All I've seen since carbon offsets became a thing is how a lot of the projects were either ineffective or outright scams. The idea itself doesn't incentivise the large carbon producers to actually reduce their emissions, but simply pay to say they are carbon neutral so they can slap it on their website for some positive pr.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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I farm in Canada which has a carbon tax, $65/ton. We're in the grip of terrible drought and I've sold all my livestock. Thought maybe I could do the world a little good and maybe make some money off my empty pastures by planting some trees or something.
After talking to the regulators it was obvious it's a HUGE fraud. There's so much red tape, and by the time you're done talking to them you find out that you can make $1-5/ton for sequestering carbon. And due to flat fees in the regulatory structure, it's really just designed to funnel this money to huge landowners and not to encourage anyone who cares to plant trees or do anything really.
So working Canadians are forced to pay $65/ton to heat their homes and drive to work, but big emitters buy bogus credits for under $5 and continue to pour out pollution while claiming to be "carbon neutral". It's the Canadian way
It's the capitalist way. I assure you America is just as bad and any "western" nation. I hate conspiracy theories but all history linked through the first world countries is slavery and exploitation and they get to write the history books.
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simply pay to say they are carbon neutral so they can slap it on their website for some positive pr.
and go further back, and the whole idea of "carbon footprint" was a scam from the get go.
It's scams and distractions all the way down, anything and everything to make sure people don't look at the real cause of the problem - those making all the money and the system that enables and encourages them at the expense of the rest of us.
If the cost was actually enough to store the CO2 they emit (and offset the other environmental damages from the sequestration), then it would be fine. But it would be so costly for some industries, that positive PR wouldn't offset the cost.
The most effective carbon sinks are peatlands. the approx. 3 Mio. km2 in Canada sequester 370 Million Tonnes of Carbon a year.
Canada alone emitted 679 Million Tonnes in 2022, with a population of just about 30 Million people.
There is simply no capacity to offset the emissions we have, even with radical land transformation. The only way is to drastically cut emissions and cut them fast.
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Even if they worked, it's like someone breaking your arm and then paying the hospital bill and calling it a day.
No, it's nothing like that. Nature doesn't care if a given gram of co2 was recently released or not. It only cares about the sum total. If the carbon capture schemes actually did grab a gram for every gram released, and then keep it stored for at least a century,, that'd work fine.
It's just that they almost certainly don't. They're way too cheap for the best capture systems we have, and they're not necessarily sequestering that carbon to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few years.
We are almost certainly going to need actual carbon sequestration. We're too close to emitting too much already.
When discussing carbon offsets with the regulator I asked if the buyers would get a refund if their chunk of carbon offset forest burned down in a forest fire.
He laughed and said they should but there's not a chance, because the system only exists to legitimize emissions. In fact many of them have already burned. And that's right from a government agent.
Kelp farming or ocean seeding are the only natural carbon capture that make sense, but we aren't doing them. That and paying people not to destroy existing forests and grasslands, but that seems hard to sell as well.
Ocean seeding may not work at all. The nutrients available are already just right, and adding more will only increase local growth at the expense of sucking up nutrients that would have spread elsewhere. Total sunk co2 wouldn't increase, and may even decrease.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/oceans-iron-not-impact-climate-change-0217
There's a lot of unknowns with kelp farming. It may not sequester co2 for long enough. Needs more research.
What would work is a tank of algae, where we then siphon them off and throw them down a mineshaft. That's too expensive right now, though.
All the IPCC models assume massive amounts of sequestration, I believe
It's a necessity at this point, even if all fossil fuel use stops globally tomorrow
Offsets are a game of 3 card monte.
The carbon is still released. We'll never win.
And the dealer gets the money.
And nothing that actively consumes co2 is added to the equation. They "preserve" something that is already there. It is literally doing nothing.
To surprise of no one... I thought it was clear that it is only a marketing fantasy to scam those who don't understand how nature works
They are doing their job if that job is to make money for the people selling them.
..its been a scam the entire time. it was a way for rich people to pay the poor people to shut up about ruining the planet, and nothing more. Not sure why anyone ever thought this was going to be effective. taxing pollution does NOTHING to stop it.
Murder offsets:
I'm allowed to murder this guy because I opened a fertility clinic which is responsible for 20 new lives!
Carbon offsets are just as ridiculous.
Made me laugh, but strictly speaking, CO2 is fungible (interchangeable), but human lives aren't.
Depends on your values.
If the overall goal is to increase the human population, it actually makes total sense
If the goal is to prevent murders, then no, it doesn't make sense
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To absolutely no one's surprise.
What they're designed to do and what they claim to do are verydifferent things.
Carbon offsets have always been a greenwash that allows the worst polluters to keep polluting while pretending to give a fuck.
Pretty much what I suspected. Just marketing and advertising BS to make companies seem to be doing more than they are.
Necessary to keep the populace calm, too. Keep it at a slow boil, that way the masses don't freak out when they finally come to the realization that it's going to hurt everyone, including them, and it's not going to be long. And even the ones who 'survive' will have to accept their children growing up in a radically different ecosystem, if any remains.
If gen pop knew how fucked we are there'd be riots in the streets.
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The only reason why Tesla is a profitable company with an insane stock price, is that Elon Musk has been using it to sell scammy carbon credits to other automakers.
So yeah, the entire system has been a government mandated scam used to lower taxes on the worst polluters.
Instead of offsets, companies should be pursuing direct carbon sequestration like with https://climeworks.com/
No estimates, no accounting magic. Just a direct measure of physical, measurable tons of carbon directly removed from the atmosphere.
Except carbon sequestration is not ever going to work and it's always going to be more expensive than having just burned that fuel in the first place.
Maybe you'll get an advantage if it's nearly free to do and you use exclusively solar power in areas with excesses of it.
But on average? Sequestration is not an answer. The carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is just too rare to effectively pull out, and it's never going to be capable of even reaching fractions of what we're emitting right now.
We have one answer to this problem and one answer only.
Stop. Using. Fossil. Fuels.
Tax carbon.
Start getting ready to do geoengineering, because we are going to need it.
People like to bitch and say that we shouldn't be changing the environment, but guess what, we're changing the environment if we like it or not, it's only a question of it it's in our interests or if it's an uncontrolled self-destructive form.
carbon sequestration is not ever going to work
I don't know what you're talking about, it's a thing that is currently being done. Not some future hypothetical tech.
But yes it is too expensive for now. Costs are coming down hopefully that continues to be the case.
And yes, the best, cheapest, most efficient way to reduce ghg is to eliminate fossil fuels.
It's hilariously expensive and it's expensive because physics. We measure carbon in the atmosphere in parts per million. The entire surface area of the planet is already littered with Caron absorbers and they don't make a dent.
It's never happening
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The problem with direct air capture is that it only is good if it exclusively uses renewables, and right now it would be much better to instead use that energy to replace fossil fuels. Only excess renewable energy should be used for it, maybe in places like Scotland that have too much wind power. Capture directly from the source is also better as the concentration of carbon is much higher in the output from a smokestack, and as such has more impact and is more energy efficient too
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The main message is that relying on [carbon offset] certification is not enough,” said the study’s lead author, Thales West, an interdisciplinary ecologist and assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and a fellow at Cambridge’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources.
The authors call for “urgent revisions” to the certification methods used to attribute avoided deforestation to these projects, pointing out major flaws in current practice.
Over the past few decades, carbon offsets have become increasingly ubiquitous, particularly in higher-income countries, where consumers can assuage their climate guilt by paying a little extra for a flight ticket or a rental car, with the understanding that their additional payment will go towards supporting a tree farm, for example.
Big, high-emitting companies like Delta, JetBlue, Disney, General Motors and Shell have all bought and sold huge amounts of carbon offsets in the name of climate action.
It’s an attractive business model for companies looking to “go green” without significant changes in their operations: purchase some carbon offsets to cancel out your emissions.
West said companies that are buying and selling carbon offsets that have been certified by third-party entities may not be aware that they’re misleading their customers—they might simply trust that the certification is legitimate.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 206 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The study looked at 26 projects in six countries: Cambodia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Tanzania, and Zambia. Researchers found that only eight of the 26 projects selling offsets showed any evidence of reducing deforestation, and even those that did failed to achieve the extent of reductions that the projects claimed.
Only 18 of the 26 projects had sufficient publicly available information to determine the number of offsets they were projected to produce. From project implementation until 2020, those 18 projects were expected to generate up to 89 million carbon offsets to be sold in the global carbon market. But researchers estimate that only 5.4 million of the 89 million, or 6.1 percent, would be associated with actual carbon emission reductions.
Some actual information on the study and how the carbon offset is overstated.
TL;DR is pointless if all you’re trying to do is reduce the word count without retaining proper/important information
You tell that robot! Go fuck yourself, metal mouth!
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So, I actually read the article. It sounds like they could or should work, in theory, but because of fraud and/or marketplace incompetence, they do not. I bring this up only because I don't think the discussion on the topic has been nuanced enough to distinguish between idea and implementation.
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